Flight Attendant Faces Terror Charges Against American Airlines

Air steward ‘terror’ rage

By JANON FISHER, NY Post

A flight attendant with a short fuse threatened to unleash jihad on American Airlines after it fired him for hurling a coffee pot at a stewardess, the feds charged yesterday.

Rodney Lorenzo, 45, mailed letters to top airline executives with “Boom!!” written on the envelopes, a prosecutor said in Brooklyn federal court. They contained pages from an employee handbook showing how to access the cockpit.

In the 2008 letters, Lorenzo — who faces charges of making terroristic threats — allegedly said he would forward the information to Islamic groups in the hope they would use it against the airline and its passengers.

After he was sacked for throwing the coffee pot, Lorenzo allegedly sent threats to the stewardess, for which he spent 41 days in a Maryland jail.

Then, the feds said, he unleashed his terror campaign on the executives.

When authorities matched the writing on the letters the executives got to those sent to the flight attendant, charges were filed in Brooklyn.

Lorenzo claimed that he threw the coffee pot because he was upset over a friend’s attempted suicide and that he’d been aiming at a door. The stewardess was not hit. Lorenzo was freed on $50,000 bond posted by a man he described as his boyfriend.

Airline spokesman Tim Smith said, “We do take seriously any type of threat to our people and the security of our company and aircraft.”

I see in the American Heritage Dictionary a stewardess is defined as “a woman flight attendant.”

I knew that.

You knew that.

But what it sort of implies here, that I also suspected, was that no one calls flight attendant’s stewardesses anymore. No mention of that in the New Oxford American Dictionary, but in the American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style it says:

The word stewardess was once an acceptable term for a female flight attendant. The masculine form steward was rarely used because the large majority of flight attendants were female. Today, flight attendant is a widely accepted term for both male and female members of a flight crew whose main job is to interact with passengers.

So the feeling there is that calling someone a stewardess is unacceptable and sexist. I see the first citation of stewardess is way back from 1631 from something called Celestina and I quote:

thou Ministresse and high Stewardesse of all temporal happinesse

Hmm. That sounds like an enjoyable flight.

But the real reason I picked stewardess as the word for today is that it is a little more commonly used than the word steward and that’s the one I actually wanted to dig into the etymology of. Historically the nobility owned multiple residences and they moved around at will. But this was before the days of monitored electronic burglar alarm systems so some guy was given the job of watching over the property. In all likelihood there were a whole crew of people managing the estate because most of them were serfs and didn’t need to get paid much. Anyway the guy in charge was the steward because he was the “warden of the sty”; sty-ward.

Now the term sty is from an old English word meaning “house” or “hall” but because we now associate it with the phrase pig sty there have been etymological rumours about that the etymology of steward was from the guy who was in charge of the pig sty. These folk etymologies must have had some traction and been believed by people because the OED actually makes a point of saying that sty wards were not in charge of pig sties.

In closing, Urbandictionary informs me that the word stewardess shares the distinction along with the word reverberated of being the longest word you can type using just your left hand. I have not tried to confirm this.

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